Slashdot Mirror
Sell Someone Else's Book On Lulu!
Albert Schueller writes "Lulu is a place where authors can self-publish their books. It's a nice response to exorbitant college textbook prices. In an interesting twist, looks like you might be able to get away with selling other people's books on Lulu and reap a tidy profit. The Lulu offering Calculus Twirly Exponentials by Dave Stuart appears to be simply a high quality scan of the much more well-known, and expensive, Calculus: Early Transcendentals 6th ed. by James Stewart. Compare the preview images available for each at Lulu and Amazon respectively."
On page 12 of the Lulu scan, the author discusses the relation of his book to "Calculus: Early Transcendentals" and explains that he is attempting to provide an alternate which exactly follows the topics and formats of the original so that students can us it as a less-costly substitute. I didn't go beyond that so maybe it's a scan, but the author does address the issue.
Long after finishing college, the Stewart calculus books are pretty much the only texts that remain on my bookshelf since then. The rest of that list is CS material that still gets referenced.
FWIW my last two real-world jobs have involved doing calculus on whiteboards, which I realize isn't all that common :-)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
As a person who's breaking into the book market with my wife's new novel and seeking an eBook option, this is precisely the sort of crap that we're worried about, just all too easy through modern POD portals like Lulu.
My first year, we had a required half credit diversity sensitivity class. The book ($70-80 maybe, it was almost 15 years ago) was about a magazine's worth of reprinted newspaper articles. Printed on campus. I think they laughed at me when I brought it to the book buyback.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.